8 Rainforest Productivity Features That Make Your Functional Testing Workflow More Effective

QA is a necessary part of building high quality products, but it can be a slow, disjointed process that creates more problems than it solves. A survey by IBM found that 65% of QA teams spend a large amount of their time running functional verification tests, making functional testing a major time and resource sink for many companies. By streamlining functional test writing, execution and management, you can prevent QA from becoming a serious bottleneck to production.

Rainforest QA makes running comprehensive functional testing faster and more efficient, so your team spends less time doing repetitive tests and more time working on high-value projects. Here are eight Rainforest platform features that help you do your functional and regression testing more effectively with Rainforest.

1. Cross-Browser Testing

Rainforest supports major browsers and legacy versions, so you can be sure that your web application works across every version that’s important to your customers. But the real efficiency hack? Rainforest lets you test as many browsers as you want in parallel. Run tests across Safari, Chrome, IE and Firefox simultaneously. You can also test legacy browsers without having to track down versions of them for yourself. Being able to test features across multiple browsers means faster results and better test coverage.

2. Tabular Variables

Setting up dummy accounts to run through login and signup flows can be a time suck. Rainforest lets you easily funnel testers to preexisting testing states using tabular variables. This allows you to distribute appropriate login info to testers without having to do it manually.

3. Embedded Tests

Embedded tests allow you to reuse tests that have already been written. Oftentimes, individual test steps will be repeated through your test suite within different tests. You can use embedded tests as building blocks for more complex tests, writing a core test — such as testing a login flow — then embedding them in other tests. If you need to modify an embedded test, it will be updated across your test suite automatically. By leveraging embedded you can manage tests more efficiently and save test writing time as your product and features evolve.

4. Automation + CI/CD Integration

We’re big fans of continuous integration and continuous delivery at Rainforest. Integrating testing into your existing workflow is critical to keeping QA fast and effective. We’ve built Rainforest to fit into developer workflows seamlessly. Our CLI lets you run, import and export Rainforest tests programmatically, enabling integration into any testing automation you already have in place. By allowing you to execute tests via the command line, you can run Rainforest tests at the same time as you run your automated tests. Our API lets you fit functional testing with Rainforest into your agile or CI/CD workflow, no matter what it looks like.

5. Test Result Importing

Getting test results in your workflow helps save time as well. Real-time alerts & access to test results via the channels you’re already using to communicate and manage product development do just that. We currently offer JIRA and Pivotal Tracker integrations to port test failures directly into your issue tracking dashboard. You can also get your Rainforest results into Slack or Hipchat, so your whole team can see your test results.

6. Quick Test Rerun

Your test failed — need to double check it? Rerun failed tests directly from the results view to save your team the trouble of leaving their workflow to run Rainforest tests again.

7. Scheduled Runs

Don’t have a full CI/CD workflow in place yet? (Check out our eBook on Getting to Continuous Deployment, if not) Rainforest allows you to schedule runs ahead of time, so you can keep testing 24/7 — even when you’re busy with other projects. Whether you want to run a core set of smoke tests every night or want to schedule test runs to sync with known release schedules, Rainforest lets you set them up, then focus on more important issues.

8. Screenshotted Tester Activity

If you can’t reproduce a bug, you can’t fix it. Many non-deterministic testing techniques are great at finding bugs, but inefficient when it comes to reproducing them consistently. Rainforest automatically records screenshots of every tester action, creating a visual log of tests. Your team can view tester performance step-by-step to visually confirm bug reports without wasting time rerunning the test manually.

Spend Less Time Managing Functional Testing and More Time Improving Quality

Rainforest provides on-demand access to crowdsourced testers to let your team spend less time doing functional testing and more time on exploratory testing and other high-value QA. Want to see how teams are putting these productivity features into action to save time and cut QA costs? Find out more about why teams doing CI/CD are choosing Rainforest for their functional testing.